My name is Norman Brightside. I work for Siebel Systems based in Egham in the UK. I am a Senior Architecture Specialist in Expert Services. Expert Services provide a range of consulting services from architecture workshops to performance troubleshooting.
My work is technical (usually includes Oracle), varied, includes travel to Siebel customers located within the UK and Europe and perhaps, most importantly, involves meeting interesting people and learning.
Remember the tiresome, well-intentioned emails at work that spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, waste a lot of time and hence, cost a lot of money but actually transpire to be a well documented hoax.
Well the blogosphere has its own endless loop equivalents for the unwary.
I will stop wasting time evaluating every RSS reader in the universe and simply revert to NewsGator Online.
This will help me to read and enjoy content when I actually have the time and inclination. This will also stop me being distracted by that insidious 'There is 1 new article' irritant which just leads to skim reading lots of irrelevant material in a mindless urge to get 'up to date'.
I will endeavour to constrain my list of feeds to those that I actually read and are of interest. The recent introduction of Technorati favo(u)rites proved to me that this number was indeed less than 50.
And finally, Cyril. And finally, Esther. I will unsubscribe immediately from Scobleizer's blog. I am starting to feel like a mindless sheep. I know millions read it and discuss it. I subscribe to it and my eyes see the words but I don't actually read it. He won't mind. He has a big enough audience. Baa.
Thats it. Enough procrastination. Finished.
I will use Microsoft Outlook to manage my email, contacts, tasks and calendar at work.
I will store work related and personal data in the same repository.
I will not store any data on a Web based service.
I will use Beyond Contacts (from DataViz) to synchronise my contacts, tasks and calendar to my aging but perfectly adequate monochrome Palm Vx.
I will either use old fashioned paper and cheap biros from leading hotel chains (I would only lose an expensive moleskin and fountain pen) or the Palm to capture stuff when I am at home, in transit, in a hostelry or away from my work computer.
I may also send emails to myself from my home computer to work.
I will manually manage my address book on my Nokia phone. This is more work for me but absolutely necessary because I dislike the Nokia PC Suite program so intensely.
I will capture my personal finances in Microsoft Money.
I will continue to use TiddlyWiki (in preference to OneNote and EverNote) to capture personal notes, jottings and information mainly because I like the sound of 'reusable non-linear personal web notebook' and it fits on a memory stick.
I will continue to keep Joomla in my thoughts.
I will no longer mock my wife for keeping lots of lists; 'The only thing you need now is a list telling you where all your lists are'.
I am following, with interest, the progress of Stowe Boyds /Message blog as it gradually, inexorably climbs up the Technorati rankings.
Excellent subject for a blog. Plenty of interesting, free material on a daily basis without any need for thought.
So I have decided to follow suit albeit a little late in the day.
Day 194. Technorati Rank: 235,668 (23 links from 12 sites)
Tune in this time tomorrow to see the impact of my new black beret.
PS. How did I know it was day 194 ?
SQL> select trunc(sysdate) - to_date('17-aug-2005', 'dd-mon-yyyy') as interval from dual;
INTERVAL
----------
194
I have a Linksys Wireless Broadband router (WRT54G).
I have a Linksys Wireless USB network adapter (WUSB54G).
The adapter is located 15 feet from the router in clear line of sight.
The strength of the signal is 70%.
There is also a (unsecured) wireless network detected with a strength of 73%.
Where is this wireless network ? In the ceiling directly above my head ?
No - not another poem from an angst ridden, lovesick teenager listening to Joy Division and Morrissey.
Two months after Christmas, I finally got around to playing X&Y by Coldplay. As I suspected, this is pure dinner party music but the singles are pleasant enough on the radio when driving.
Chris Martin seems well intentioned but there is something unsettling about his intentionally unkempt hair, his children's names and the plethora of multi-coloured wrist and finger bands he wore at Live 8.
My 'Early Doors' DVD's also sits unopened, pristine in shrink wrap but will get used on the next business trip abroad (now that United's season is over).
At least my main present from Father Christmas, a spiral bound UK road atlas, has made it to the back seat of my car but also lies unopened as yet. The main reason for this was that Pages 38/40 mysteriously disappeared from its predecessor. Not a major problem until you are asked to travel, at short notice, to a client in Aldershot. Page 38 encompasses the Camberley-Fleet-Aldershot Bermuda triangle.
Next year, I really must follow Peter Scott's example and ask for a goat for someone who really needs it.
Important message to all you bloggers contemplating a migration to WordPress.com.
Google has just launched Google Pages - a Web site builder with lots of 'Looks' and 'Layouts' available to choose from and a nice, friendly easy to use WYSIWYG interface.
Like all Web 2.0 applications, it is still a beta version.
However, this seems an odd product to launch in 2006. As Mark E. Smith once said 'Are you still doing what you did 5 years ago - Yeah ? Well - don't make a career out of it'.
Here is my effort to show you what is possible with minimal effort and no knowledge of HTML whatsoever.
If you like my style, I am available at evenings and weekend for commissions.
In a previous life, I was a development DBA. Sorry thats not quite true. My job title was Persistence Architect for a J2EE application. The Oracle database wasnt really considered to be a database. In fact, it wasnt even considered to be a repository either. The database was merely a means of persisting objects.
There was a swear box for the terms 'Table', 'Column', 'Database', 'record, 'schema', 'SELECT' and bizarrely, 'PMON'. This meant I had to resurrect the word 'tuple'.
Anyway, I was responsible for the production system which was lightly loaded and adequately configured so life was easy and I could blog and surf all day. Well, actually I couldn't because I didn't blog back then and I was behind a corporate firewall so I just had some EJB's and the complete Oracle 9i documentation set for company.
One Friday, a developer came along and asked me to restart the DEV database. I asked 'Why ?'. He replied 'Because it is the second Friday in the month'. I asked 'Why ?'. 'Because we restart it every two weeks at Friday lunchtime'. 'Why ?'. 'Because that's what Bryan used to do' 'Why ?'. 'To fix the Oracle bug where we can't instantiate any more objects'. 'What Oracle bug ?'. 'Look - I really don't know - some stupid low level Oracle error. Please just restart it'.
Ten minutes investigations revealed he was indeed speaking the truth. The Oracle listener was failing with 'Unable to fork process' due to a lack of resources. Just like the objects, database connections were also persisted. This was a development Solaris server with lots of components co-hosted with 2 CPU, 512 MB memory and a paltry 128 MB swap space. Configured more swap space, ordered more memory. Job done.
Everyone was happy. All objects could be instantiated successfully and I didn't have to set a fortnightly reminder to restart Oracle on Friday lunchtime.
So, I was able to return to the 'Concepts' guide and my status was elevated from 'quiet man in corner' to 'Hero'.
A couple of months later, I was asked to look into the 'appalling lack of performance scalability' of the database on UAT. Apparently, during load tests, the J2EE application could only process 800 transactions per hour. Well, they weren't actually conventional database transactions but rather complex, involved business processes.
UAT had a 128 MB buffer cache and a 1 GB shared pool. Odd. The shared pool was littered with lots of almost identical SQL statements with embedded literals. I suspect the shared pool was originally 128 MB, the library cache hit ratio was low and some performance tuning wizard (human or otherwise) recommended 'Low library cache hit ratio means increase shared pool immediately'. Repeat ad infinitum.
I summoned up the courage and talked to the developers. 'Would it be possible to modify the application to use bind variables ?' 'No. Listen. We just use objects. We don't make database calls'. Some more investigations. The J2EE application uses TopLink which is an interface layer translating the objects into database accesses.
I decided to read the TopLink manual and suggested setting the TopLink configuration parameter 'should-bind-all-parameters' to True and repeat the test. While the development team made the changes, I reduced the shared pool to 128MB and increased the buffer cache to 1GB.
Repeat test. Staggering improvement to over 3,000 'transactions' per hour.
My status is immediately elevated to 'demigod'. Why, they were so grateful, a Java developer finally divulged the proxy they were all using to access the internet.
I created my own private swear box for the terms 'EJB', 'J2EE', 'Container Managed Persistence', 'multiple inheritance', 'classes', 'methods', 'destructors' and 'Persistence Architect' and returned to quietly reading the fine Oracle manuals.
A kind gentleman (on The Chameleons forums) once reviewed Interpols Antics thus:
No thanks. If I want to listen to Joy Division, I will put 'Unknown Pleasures' on.
A worthy review which introduced me to one of my favourite bands. He also followed up more recently by reviewing 'The Back Room' by The Editors as follows:
No thanks. If I want to listen to Interpol, I will put 'Antics' on.
The jury is still out on this one but worth listening to, I think. Thanks again.
I am currently poised waiting for his thoughts on the Arctic Monkeys. However, worryingly, he has been a little quiet of late. I wonder if he got a job with NME.